The art history account says that this example of 20th-century expressionist art is one of a series of still lifes depicting carcasses, slabs of meat, and hanging fowl that Chaim Soutine, a Russian-born artist who spent his entire career in France, painted between 1922 and 1925. It says that while such images make deliberate reference to a long tradition of the subjects of butchers, market-stalls, and game in paintings by Rembrandt, Chardin, and Goya, whose works Soutine (1893-1943) studied in his visits to the Louvre, his thick, modernist application of paint serves almost as a physical metaphor for flesh and blood. Executed with an overloaded brush, the surface of the composition is powerfully dense:

Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1924, Oil on canvas.

Chaim Soutine is appropriated as a father figure of different traditions, of American Abstract Expressionism and British expressive realism. Soutine isinterpreted as one of the 'essential outsiders of the twentieth century, an artist without final home or place. He doesn’t fit the conventional categories of art, as the curators suggest. He insists upon what his society ignores, rejects, or forgets. He is a figure like Nietzsche, Dostoevski, or Kafka, one whose heated imagination seems to flare out -- prophetically -- from marginal rooms and cramped circumstances.'

What does a philosophical aesthetics say about butchered meat, blood and putrefying flesh? A modernist one informed by Adorno's argument that art is left reeling because of the ways in which modern capitalist life has turned into fragments.

According to this review of J. M. Bernstein's Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Soutine expresses more directly a problem hit upon by Kant: the problem of duality according to which humans are explained as physical things on the one hand (part of nature, of the physical sciences), and maker of thoughts and inhabitor of freedom on the other. By referring art to a philosophical problem, art in its implicit way aims to reveal the deepest/metaphysical conditions of human existence, and does so -- can only do so, like philosophy -- by speaking in and through the age.

Is this what Soutine is doing? Unfortuately I don't know enough about his work.